Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

You see, he said, returning to his theme, I wouldn’t talk that way to one of these other girls. I simply wouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t voice them to the adjutant or the lieutenant-colonel. So that leaves you, poor girl.

She found herself laughing low.

Shall we get out and go for a stroll? he asked. The cars are over there.

He helped her down onto the rubbly floor the pyramids grew from. There would have been other couples out there in the half dark staring at the great shapes as the flare beneath the Sphinx’s chin burned out and left them half blinded. They all hoped that this place would elevate their evening jaunt in one way or another. But the conversation between her and Lieutenant Maclean dwindled out here—there was too much space for words to make a dent. Soon the nurses and officers transferred to the cars which had followed them, and in a final burst of squeezed-in merriment, they reached the hospital.

All the rumors were of something named the Dardanelles. Staff Nurse Carradine said, It’ll be better than France. Because in France, everyone knew by Christmas and New Year, there had been that great sacrifice of young men and the near capture of Paris. It developed that the Dardanelles were Turkish and closer to the seat of the Ottoman Empire than Sinai. And although all this evoked ideas of the scimitar and the harem and the torture chamber, these old-fashioned implements and places seemed to make the Turks less accurate and less well-trained shots than the Germans—the malign Huns who had molested Belgian nuns but clearly knew how to string out a battle.

In the mauve dusk Sally and the others sometimes stood on top of the flat roof of Mena House and looked at the battalions marching back out of the desert to their tents, all in good order—ambulances trailing behind as if purely for the experience of it. She watched the light horsemen wheel in fairly modest plumes of dust, and the infantry battalions surge—without effort, as it seemed—over empty spaces. Gradually, distant band music entered the equation. Perhaps only a hundred boys suffering from heat exhaustion had been carried to the hospital for treatment lest their dehydration and core temperature be allowed to affect their brain.

The leisurely night excursions to Cairo were gone. When Lieutenant Eric Carradine arrived to see his wife, his face looked older. So did the other men who turned up in the evenings for a while and sat in the cane chairs on the roof with the nurses. One Lionel Dankworth—who to his disgust had been made a gunnery officer—was seen nuzzling the side of Honora’s face, and handsome Ellis Hoyle sought Naomi’s hand while—most astoundingly—Naomi at one stage yielded it up to him.

When do they do it, d’you think? Honora asked Sally over tea later. Elsie and Eric—when do they manage it? You don’t see them sneaking out, do you?

Honora the earthy woman asked such lusty and practical questions. One day, during tea in the mess, little sharp-nosed Nettice teased Honora by asking her, did she tell her chaplain about all the officers she’d hugged and kissed.

Yes, she said. But I tell him I do it only out of mercy, not because I’m a low girl. It’s work to make men brave, I tell him, and they can’t be brave unless they’re happy.

Sally and others were inside the venereal compound again. There were the new victims of overestimated Venus. And ones who out of shame or recklessness had neglected to present themselves till the thing was established in them. Some had become accustomed to their shame or bad fortune and seemed to enjoy their leisure. They passed newspapers around and rolled cigarettes and discussed race results from twelve thousand miles away at Randwick or Flemington. But one day even the most unrepentant began to look bewildered and displaced when the bugles—as in an opera—began to draw nearer from the direction of the camp.

The route march of some twenty-five thousand infantry and light horse brigades eastwards towards the Canal passed the oasis where Mena House and its medical tents stood. From the wards the confident boots could be heard in unison and the imperious orders of officers and of sergeant majors with the voices of near-mad dogs. The sounds were enormous and constant and drew one out of doors. Some of the afflicted men even emerged from the tents to watch hopelessly, and Sally and the others ended their work and were escorted out of the compound. On the fringe of the palms they saw how long it took for just one battalion to pass with its accompanying trucks and ambulances and cooks. And then another band would come behind—blaring on yet another battalion to triumph and getting effusive with “The British Grenadiers,” “Song of Australia,” “Hope and Glory,” “Waltzing Matilda,” “Rule Britannia,” “Flash Jack from Gundagai.”

Honora Slattery announced the battalions as they passed. One, the First, was the founding stone from which the glory or the tragedy would be built, and at the head of a company within—barely to be seen in the dusty atmosphere—Captain Hoyle. And somewhere in the mass, Lieutenant Maclean. Someone—Carradine perhaps—had an operatic duty to run into the ranks and cling to her unswerving beloved. Finding then her clasp weakened by the tide of men coming behind, she should reel disconsolate from the ruthless host and weep on the verges of the desert as the regimental glory swept by. Staff Nurse Carradine did in fact appear—pale under the sun with Nettice—and they scanned the myriad of men for a sight of Eric Carradine, for the Victoria brigade was passing. The artillery came last. Tall Lionel sat on a horse to wave flamboyantly and grin crookedly in the hope his smile might reach Honora. It continued and continued until wonder was blunted. By dusk they were all vanished, and the band music evaporated from the air. Somehow Carradine’s Eric was not sighted in the distracting masses. It was because, Sally knew, he had been looked for with too much effort.

After a few days Carradine had a fevered glow in her eye and was calculating that by now her husband was—along with every man who had taken tea at Mena House—either off some perilous shore or on it. Some light horse officers still came to tea, though many of their brethren too had been sent off on the adventure. These ones, however, had to stay here to stop the Turks raging out of Sinai to take the Canal. They gave the usual reassurances that if the Dardanelles rumors were right, there would be no grief at all. Kaiser Bill had dumped all his defective arms on the poor Turks because he needed the decent ones in France and Belgium.

The hospital seemed empty—except for that outlying, guarded leper colony. New transports from Australia were imminent. But for the moment there was hardly anyone in the desert camp to be cut by wire or an unwise lunge of a bayonet. A light horseman had appendicitis, an orderly caught pneumonia even though the hot season and the blizzards of grit named khamsin were starting. And the matron was sent to another hospital. It was rumored she had annoyed the colonel whom they never saw by demanding menial work of orderlies that he thought “her girls” should do.

One noon scandalous Matron Mitchie, the being who had made colonels hoot aboard the ship to Egypt, arrived by car at the door of Mena House. Through the window of a ward Sally saw her disembark while receiving a halfway military salute from the orderly who had opened the door for her. Hampered only by a slight arthritic limp—as if there had to be some small imperfection in her or else the more humorless gods would be forced to take a yet more serious tax from her—she rose up the steps to the wide veranda. Later, Sally happened to be in the chief building nursing an unconscious officer whose mount had thrown him during a race, when an orderly arrived.